Gravure printing is becoming increasingly popular and has been described as the printing process of the 80's. One of the most attractive features of gravure printing is the ability to produce prints having uniform tonal gradations in the highlight and middle tone areas. This continuous tone effect makes the gravure process ideal for high quality printing. However, where the printing substrates are ink repellent, or hard, coarse, grainy papers, grainy printing or dot skipping can be a problem. To combat this problem, electroassist is often used on gravure presses to insure a complete transfer of the ink from the gravure cells to the substrate. The primary function of electroassist is to improve the ink transfer to the lighter tone areas on a printed substrate that normally would not accept the ink. Electroassist is carried out by producing an electric field in the printing nip which deforms the surface of the ink in individual gravure cells and increases the likelihood of contact between the ink and the substrate. Unfortunately, the electric forces generated in the nip on the ink continue to act on the transferred ink as the printed substrate leaves the nip. Thus, if the transferred ink is not immediately dried or otherwise immobilized these forces may cause the ink to spread beyond its proper boundaries. The latter phenomena is defined as whiskering, or the rough edged spreading of ink due to electrical forces on the ink. Accordingly, in order to study the whiskering phenomena under controlled laboratory conditions, the present invention was developed as a test device for reproduceably producing whiskers to measure the whiskering tendency of different substrates and inks.